This project attempts to describe the patterns of asset accumulation and savings among middle-aged and older American households. This description will be comprehensive in an important dimension often ignored in the literature. Most studies have used personal net worth, but this ignores large components of wealth: pensions, social security, Medicare and other income conditioned social insurance wealth. These often-neglected components are not only quantitatively large, but they are distributed quite differently across income and race than personal net worth is. By viewing all these components in combination as well as in isolation, new insights can be gained about the reality and motives that cause wealth differences across households. Two important new data sets will be used: the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) and Asset and Health Dynamics of the Oldest-Old (AHEAD). Combined, these two innovative surveys span the mature and older ages in the life cycle. They hold the promise of significantly improved measurement of wealth both in the quality of individual items as well as the components of wealth that can be measured. Both surveys also include new comprehensive and innovative measures of covariates such as health status which may help us understand why these wealth disparities emerge.